How to Effectively Use Twitter

Yeah, the fly-by-nighters love it because there is no effective way of measuring whether or not they have done anything at all for the money they collected. Often, it simply means that I'll spam your site to my Twitter feed. It probably wouldn't hurt to add it, though.

Oh, I do spam my sites to my Twitter feed, but I do it in much the same way that others might cross their fingers before wishing for something. Who knows what might work.

Sometimes, when I'm really lazy, I will tweet:

Pretend I said something profound here and then visit webdirectoryforum.org.

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You know, I still have yet to understand how to truly market in twitter. I opened a twitter account several years ago, along with linked in and instagram, and until now... never once even looked at it. Can someone please explain to me how to use these as marketing tools? I get that there are people having success (so apparently they work to some degree) but how they are using it is beyond me. I opened it as a means to chit chat with people, not market. I've considered using it as a means to chat with customers in the future, which then I would use it to market new products and specials, but how do you use it so that it shows that you have a site? Or if there really is any use at it at all.

Sorry, when marketing a site I concentrate on three things... SEO, Directory submissions, and blogs not social media. So I am still trying to figure those out.

You know, I still have yet to understand how to truly market in twitter. I opened a twitter account several years ago, along with linked in and instagram, and until now... never once even looked at it. Can someone please explain to me how to use these as marketing tools?

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When I am using Twitter to promote the forum, I will prepare about 50 tweets ahead of time, pointing people to different areas of the forum, mostly threads that are active, plus a few general tweets pointing to the main page of the forum, like so:

Feel free to lurk but we’d rather have you participate at webdirectoryforum.org.

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That will bring a bunch of people to the forum if I do it in the early evening or on a Saturday afternoon. Most won't stay more than a few seconds, and rarely will someone register for an account, but occasionally someone does so I suppose it's worth it.

As far as tools, there are several available. It's a good idea to tie your Twitter account in to any website that you have. There are WordPress plugins that will help you do that if your site is WP-based. There are also tools that will allow you to automate your Tweets but I don't use those. Depending on what your needs are, you'll find a few additional tools here.

I use "WhoUnfollowedMe" to find out who I am following who isn't following me, so that I can unfollow them as well. Plus there are apps available for the Mac, as I am sure there are for Windows-based machines that allow me to simultaneously tweet something and post it to my Facebook account, although I seldom use them either.

I am not a power user of Twitter. I use it often, and it is sometimes successful, but I don't devote much of my time or effort to it. Whenever I add a directory to my directory of directories or publish a review to my review site, I tweet it, and I get some visits from the effort.

Interesting. Now my brain is reeling on ideas... The thing is, how do I get followers? I don't really use Twitter so I don't have any followers and I don't want to use those follow me tools to get a bunch of useless followers. Got any advice on that?

The thing is, how do I get followers? I don't really use Twitter so I don't have any followers and I don't want to use those follow me tools to get a bunch of useless followers. Got any advice on that?

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I would skip the schemes that promise you a certain number of followers for however much money, as I would the ones that involve retweeting posts advertising the follow scheme because, while your numbers may rise, they aren't real people, and if those that may be real people aren't people who are actually reading your stuff. I tried some of that stuff in the beginning and it creates a hell of a mess, so I eventually unfollowed a bunch of people who didn't really seem to be people, or who were tweeting stuff that I couldn't relate to in any way.

However, fairly new to Twitter, you can now ignore people without having to unfollow them. In that way, you can still keep their number, if you want, without having to be burdened by their nonsensical tweets.

I have a personal Twitter account and a couple of business ones. You could have more but that's about all that I want to keep up with. I don't bring a lot of business stuff to my personal account, although I might throw in a push every now and then. Mostly, my personal account is about politics. I don't bring any personal stuff to my business accounts, at least not when I'm paying attention to what I'm doing. My accounts, of course, follow one another, and sometimes retweet things down the line.

Perhaps the best way to get real followers, ones who might actually read your tweets, is by following some of the followers of your followers, particularly those whose profiles indicate that you might have interests in common. Don't follow hundreds of them at one time because it looks silly when you're following a thousand people and only three hundred of them are following you back.

What I do is take one follower at a time, following maybe 50-100 of his followers, skipping those who have far more followers than they have people who they are following, because they probably won't follow you back. Within a week, several of these will follow you. After a week, I then unfollow anyone who isn't following me.

I let it go like that for another week, then follow from 50-100 followers of another of my followers. In my case, I look particularly for the ones who are involved in web directories or mention that they have websites, etc. What you are looking for is something in common. Do the same thing with that group, then continue.

I wasn't particularly interested in the numbers for my personal site but I have about as many followers in that account as I do my business one. I also go through my personal account, looking for people who are involved in web directories, and follow from my business account. They will see that they have at least one follower in common, and are likely to follow that account as well.

It also helps to use #HashTags because they form what are essentially categories within Twitter that people will check every now and then. Thus when I use #WebDirectory or #WebDirectories in my tweets from time to time, these are things that other people interested in directories will search on, and they'll find my tweets there.

It also helps when you have a nice mix of useful, humorous, or other tweets that are not advertising in nature, along with the ones that are essentially advertisements because, like anywhere, a lot ads begins to look like spam and you'll lose followers. When I'm really paying attention, I'll try to put some humor into my ads as well.

Make a point of retweeting things that you agree with or even things that you don't disagree with too strongly. Be sure to check any links to tweets that you are retweeting though, because often they don't relate in any way to what the Twit is tweeting.

People like it when you "retweet" or "favorite" their stuff, so they will be more likely to do the same for you, or to click on your links, and less likely to unfollow you. Also, reply to things that have some level of interest once in a while too, for the same reasons.

You'll lose followers often but as long as you're gaining more than you're losing, you'll do well.

I'm slowly learning how to use Twitter more effectively. To get followers, I have found the best thing is to search for your topic and keywords. Follow 5-10 people each day that talk about your topic. Most of the time, they end up following you back, especially if your content is truly on topic and useful.

One way to effectively use Twitter and build a presence on it is by using applications and sites like Hootsuite. Hootsuite enables users to manage multiple accounts at once. Users can also schedule tweets to be released at certain times. Tweets can even be scheduled a month in advance. This tool allow tweeters to build a presence without having to be on Twitter all the time.

I think to effectively use Twitter you have to be consistent. You have to tweet on a daily basis and multiple times a day. Following people that post things that you like as well as people that will benefit you in some way, as well as you benefitting them. For instance, I have a independent music, art, and fashion blog. If I were to post something about a specific artists, I would tag them. Hopefully, they like it and will favorite and share it. Sometimes, these musicians have a lot of fans as well as other musicians that they follow. Things like that leads to a lot of chain reaction type situations and you will get a lot of the people you are looking for to follow you.

First of all, in January I schedule tweets for a year in advance. Just text tweets. I do that so that there's constant movement on the account, even if I don't actually post anything myself for a while. Then, I also have my blog's RSS feed autoposting to it, so every time I publish something on my blog it gets shared on my Twitter account automatically. Then, I also used to schedule picture tweets, but I stopped doing that because I have to schedule them one-by-one, which is extremely time-consuming. So that's on my to-do list, to find a site that allows me to schedule tweets with pictures in bulk...

So that takes care of content...

Then, for followers. I use the social exchange sites for that mostly (e.g Addmefast, Likenation, etc). That gives me followers who may be mostly fake, but it makes me look like people like and follow my account, for when the real people land on it.

Also - and I plan to start doing this more - I have an iMacro script that automatically follows someone's followers. So every once in a while I go to other accounts in my niche - humor niche - and I set the iMacro to follow their followers; about a 100 of them, more or less. And some of them will follow me back...

And also I have an iMacro that you put a keyword or hashtag and it will go and automatically favorite tweets that include the word or hashtag I specified. Those users will be notified I favorited their stuff, and some will follow me.

And that's the point of the fake followers I do, because then when I favorite someone's tweet and they come to check my account out, they're more likely to follow me if I have 5000 followers than if I have 500, that's my belief.

So you can see, I don't "Actively" market on Twitter. I just automate it as much as I can and leave it at that. And to my surprise, it does bring a tiny bit of traffic to my site...

The point is, I'd rather automate that and sit and concentrate on producing content on my website and stuff like that, than waste hours and hours on Twitter...

I have done some work with Twitter but I have yet to see even one single visitor coming from my tweets. All my visitors come from Facebook. What exactly did I do wrong? Do I have to spend time on Twitter the same way I spent time on Facebook?

Do I have to spend time on Twitter the same way I spent time on Facebook?

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You do have to spend some time building up a cache of real followers, who are people who are actually reading your stuff. This also involves retweeting their stuff from time to time, favoriting it or, better yet, commenting on things that others who you are following are saying.

Take an interest in what they have to say and some of them will take an interest in what you have to say. I do very well getting people to click on links that I tweet, while I can rarely get someone to click on anything I post on Facebook. I can easily get people to "like" my posts but they don't actually click on it.

Comments that I actually post on Facebook, people will read and comment on, but the people on my Friends list, at least, are hesitant about clicking away from Facebook.

One important thing about Twitter is to make a point of posting informative, or cute, or otherwise interesting stuff that doesn't involve advertising often, because then people will be more likely to be responsive when you do post something that you'd like people to click on.

Well, the first thing that you will want to do is make sure that you have enough Twitter followers. If you don't have that many then no matter what you post, it won't matter since not many people are seeing what you're posting. The next thing I would do is come up with a series of tweets that you want to say and make them all different and attractive. You want something that will draw someone in when they read it. Also, make sure that you use hashtags because then when other people look at those hashtags they will also see your tweet. So in a sense make sure that you are using hashtags that are popular, but also relevant.

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